In his cover article in the July/August issue of the The Atlantic Monthly (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?“), Nicholas Carr raises what for some will be an alarming prospect: that we may soon face the end of reading, the end of thinking, and the end of culture as we have known them for hundreds of years, thanks to the Internet and the dramatic ways in which it is reshaping the way we learn, interact, and express ourselves.

He begins with a personal reflection:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Carr believes the problem stems from the years he has spent on the Internet. For a writer, researcher, and blogger like him, the Net has been a blessing, he admits, putting hitherto unprecedented volumes of information at his fingertips. But the blessing has also been a curse because of how the Internet does it. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” he says. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

The argument struck us as important, though it wasn’t entirely new to us. Carr, a member of Britannica’s editorial board, explored similar territory in a blog post here a year ago. In that piece he warned that “[the] way of thinking shaped by the careful arrangement of words on printed pages” would not survive in the digital age:

“Contemplative Man, the fellow who came to understand the world sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, is a goner. He’s being succeeded by Flickering Man, the fellow who darts from link to link, conjuring the world out of continually refreshed arrays of isolate pixels, shadows of shadows. The linearity of reason is blurring into the nonlinearity of impression; after five centuries of wakefulness, we’re lapsing into a dream state.”

Of course, worries about the impact of electronic media on literacy are nothing new; we’ve heard complaints for decades that television is responsible for the decline of reading. But what we hear today is different: not just that we will read less in the age of the Internet, but that the very way we read, think, and perhaps even write could be profoundly debased by it. Carr cites Nietzsche’s adoption of the typewriter as an example of how the tools of composition shape and change what’s written. The philosopher’s writing, Carr reports, became more epigrammatic and “telegraphic” when he moved from pen to typing machine.

Concerning reading, Carr highlights the work of Tufts University developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf and suggests “that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.”

In short, the Internet is making us stupid.

It’s a baleful scenario, indeed, and certainly not everyone agrees. Carr himself pauses to wonder if he isn’t overdoing it.

“Maybe I’m just a worrywart,” he writes. “Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. . . . Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.”

That Carr’s stark vision of the future is both important and, at the same time, that it may not be the final word on the subject is what prompted this forum. That’s why we have invited other writers to comment, and as always we invite you to do so as well. We’ll revise this post with links to these additional pieces as they appear, so feel free to bookmark this page; it will serve as the switchboard to the forum.

There is more to Carr’s argument than what we have mentioned here. Please read the whole article and give us your thoughts.